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Highest Graded Cobb Back from Lucky 7 Find Sold

The highest graded card in the ‘Lucky 7 Find’ of T206 Cobb backs has been sold, leaving just three of the seven cards left.

PSA President Joe Orlando says the VG+ (4.5) copy was claimed over the weekend.

Sources tell SC Daily a private collector purchased the card for between $1 million and $2 million.

Two of the three cards graded 2.5 by PSA and another rated 1.5 were sold earlier this month for a total price of over $1 million.

Rick Snyder of MINT State has been handling sales of the scarce 1911-era cards. Orlando says the selling prices of all seven cards are expected to be divulged once they’ve been sold. To this point, no numbers for any of the four cards have been released but PSA has adjusted the values in its online Sports Market Report price guide since the find. Currently, the SMR price for a 4.5 is at $750,000. It’s likely the selling prices for the cards from the find were much greater than the figures listed in the guide, however.

The Cobb back find will likely net the family that discovered them last month a seven-figure windfall. They were uncovered in the same region Snyder’s company calls home and he was the dealer who got the call from the family that found them nestled in a crumpled paper bag on the floor of a dilapidated home once occupied by a relative. The original owner of the cards passed away many years ago and at some point the cards were put inside the bag along with old postcards and other paper material.

The prevailing theory is that the “Ty Cobb Tobacco” cards were issued inside tins of the same brand. It was apparently a short-lived product that made its debut in the southeast early in 1910. There are fewer than two dozen known copies of the card, which carries a slightly glossy front image, different from the traditional T206 cards issued in American Tobacco Company products between 1909 and 1911.

About Rich Mueller

Rich is the editor and founder of Sports Collectors Daily. A broadcaster and writer for more than 30 years and a collector for even longer than that, he's usually typing something somewhere. Type him back at [email protected].